The invention relates to the organization, presentation, and manipulation of images. More particularly, the invention provides efficient, user-friendly means and procedures for presenting images of anatomical structure and the like for examination.
The invention is also concerned with the activation of a display container for medical images in a context of a plurality of display containers, and with the presentation of icons without distracting the attention of a user from medical images which are being examined.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important, non-invasive imaging modality that is widely used by radiologists to examine internal anatomy to aid in the analysis of trauma and the diagnosis of disease. An MRI study provides a multi-planar representation of an anatomical target in the form of one or more image series. The images of a series may be parallel planar "slices" of the anatomical target which are incrementally registered along an imaging axis. Another imaging technology may produce image sequences which include non-parallel views that are incrementally registered about an axis of rotation or over a non-planar surface.
MRI technology is well understood. See, for example, MRI OF THE KNEE by Jerrol H. Mink, et al, Raven Press Ltd. (New York, N.Y. 1987) and the work by F.W. Wehrli, et al, entitled PARAMETERS DETERMINING THE OCCURRENCE OF NMR IMAGES published by the General Electric Company, Medical Systems Operations, in 1983.
In the prior art, the transparencies produced by an MRI system would be manually mounted in their series sequence on long light boxes where they would be read and annotated by radiologists. Following examination, the images would be physically stored in a patient's medical history folder. Recently, automated systems for archiving, retrieving, and presenting MRI images have been developed. In these systems, the images are conventionally converted to multi-bit, pixelated data representations which are formatted, stored, and retrieved using file management techniques. However, most conventional file management techniques are adapted for storage, retrieval, and presentation of documents, rather than images. Of course, these systems give even less consideration to the specialized requirements for storage and presentation of images showing internal anatomy.
Even the addition of a directly-manipulated user interface in conventional image storage and presentation systems does little to adapt these systems to the special needs of radiologists who must consider and manipulate many images in particular ways for special purposes. Furthermore, each radiologist has a highly personal mode of examination. For example, one radiologist may wish to examine a first sequence of transparencies in its entirety and then a second, related sequence before trying to correlate between individual images of the sequences. Another radiologist may wish to examine sequences in parallel by simultaneously considering images taken of the same anatomical plane under different conditions of exposure. Even currently-available database systems which have been adapted for storage and presentation of radiological images have not automated the presentation modalities of image series. Instead, a radiologist must provide for the individual retrieval and presentation of each and every stored image. In these systems, the images are individually identified and processed for storage and presentation without correlation to other images in their respective sequences. Furthermore, the existing systems do not provide for concurrent presentation of related image series.
Moreover, the currently available automated image storage systems are awkward and difficult to use, providing little in the way of means for direct manipulation of image presentation formats and images which are displayed for analysis.